About This Podcast

After two weeks of traveling, Arnie is back in town to recount his adventures on this week's podcast. His first trip was to Canada to testify about the Pickering Nuclear Plant on Lake Ontario. His second trip was to southern California to speak at the conference "Fukushima Daiichi Accident: Lessons for California" alongside former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford. While Arnie was in California, we received the news that the San Onofre Nuclear Plant near San Diego was closing permanently. So, what happens at San Onofre now? Listen in, and find out.

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Transcript

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NWJ: This is a Fairewinds Energy Education Podcast. Today is Wednesday, June 12th, and my name is Nathaniel White-Joyal. Today we are joined by Chief Engineer, Arnie Gundersen and President Maggie Gundersen. And they’re going to catch us up with the developments in nuclear power over the past two weeks. Thank you both for being here today.

MG: You’re welcome. Thanks for having us.

AG: Yeah, thanks. It’s nice to be home.

MG: Arnie, where you been? I haven’t seen you in two weeks.

AG: Yeah, with the exception of one Saturday, I haven’t been here. I was in Canada two weeks ago testifying in front of their CNSC. That stands for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. And that’s like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission here. About the Pickering units that are up on the lake near Toronto. That was a fascinating experience. It’s entirely unlike the American hearings, because in the American hearings, they don’t talk to you. And as a matter of fact, last time I testified to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the head of the panel I was testifying to, not only did he not talk to me, but he fell asleep. These guys are active and involved and they ask you questions, which was an exciting difference.

MG: And what happened? When they asked you – like what was the set-up like? How many people were on the panel? What did it look like? How many people were sitting next to you helping you testify? Was it a long hearing?

AG: Well, I testified for about half an hour. And it was me at a desk. And on the right side of me were – oh, must have been 15 people representing the staff of the Regulator and on the left side of me were 15 or 20 people representing the people that owned the power plant. And in front of me were the 9 commissioners, all of which are appointed by pro-nuclear forces. So I felt a little bit surrounded at the meeting.

MG: You couldn’t even have one of the interveners who had retained you sitting with you?

AG: No, it was my report and they wanted to hear from me. And it was, like I said, an exciting dialogue. They seemed to want to know a little bit about what I had to say. The Pickering unit is really near Toronto. Nothing like it in the United States. It’s only 30 kilometers from the edge of Toronto, about 20 miles from the edge of Toronto. And Toronto is the 4th biggest city on the continent, with 4 or 5 million people. So they built six nuclear plants within 20 or 30 miles of the biggest city in Canada and one of the biggest cities on the continent.

MG: So there are six nuclear plants that close to a major city with that many people?

AG: Well, the good news is there were actually 8, but they shut 2 down.

MG: What type of containment system do they have?

AG: They admitted on testimony that their containment was not as good as Fukushima Daiichi. I think that was the highlight from the other side. They acknowledged that if a Fukushima Daiichi accident happened in Pickering, the containment is not as good, and that you can have a failure that would result in a serious release of radiation to the City of Toronto. Now they get around that problem by assuming the accident that causes it doesn’t happen. So if you assume the accident can’t happen, you don’t have to worry about the containment.

MG: Oh, my gosh. I mean that’s as frightening as thinking about what happened with the plants blowing up in Daiichi, that there was never going to be a tsunami there; they didn’t have to think about it. So don’t protect the cooling source for the nuclear plants and it won’t happen. It’s like – I think we had a podcast up a while ago where we had an ostrich with its head in the sand, because people just don’t want to know what’s happening. I think that was about the San Onofre plant. Wasn’t that the ostrich in the sand?

AG: Yeah. The sand that the ostrich had its head in was right by San Onofre.

NWJ: Didn’t you present about the San Onofre plant while you were out in California last week?

AG: Yeah. I came back from Canada, washed my clothes and turned around and hopped on a plane out to California. Then the topic there was San Onofre and frequent visitors to the site will know we’ve been talking about San Onofre now since March of last year when the steam generator sprung a leak. And we did a big video in April of last year about the steam generator springing a leak.

MG: Well, Fairewinds Associates, which is the expert witness firm that I own and you’re one of the expert witnesses with that firm, has done five major reports on San Onofre and you did testimony in front of the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board. You were out there for an international symposium, correct?

AG: I went out there to be a speaker at a symposium three hours with international speakers, including the former Prime Minister of Japan Kan, former NRC chairman Jaczko and former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford. So the four of us spoke for three hours about the weaknesses in the regulatory system and how southern California was just as much in jeopardy as Fukushima Daiichi.

MG: I have met Peter Bradford a number of times in our work here in Vermont and he’s one of my heroes because he’s one of only two NRC commissioners – Peter Bradford and Victor Galinski – who did not go to work for the nuclear industry after finishing their time on the Commission. Peter Bradford was on the commission when Three Mile Island had its accident, and he’s been very clear about some of the errors that were made and I really commend him for stepping up to the plate and talking about that.

AG: Yeah, there’s a link to the Prime Minister’s Kan video, a link to former chairman Jaczko’s video and a link to Peter Bradford’s video on the site as well as my speech. And they wove together very well. There were about 15 cameras there and maybe 10 other press, plus a couple hundred people from Southern California. The room was full. And we spoke from all of our different angles. I mean we had a politician, two regulators and a former industry senior VP – me. And we all talked about the fact that the system under which nuclear is regulated is fundamentally bankrupt.

NWJ: Could you explain a little bit more specifically about what you mean by fundamentally bankrupt? Are there any examples you can give us?

AG: Yeah. The nuclear regulators spend so much time with the people they’re regulating that we call it the Echo Chamber Effect. And I wrote about that for Greenpeace earlier this year in a major report. And it’s called The Echo Chamber Effect. But basically, if you put a bunch of experts in a room and they talk to each other long enough, all they hear is each other’s echoes. And that’s what happens with nuclear. You get the nuclear regulator and the people that own these nuclear power plants in a room, and as long as there’s no outsiders like me or Dave Lochbaum from Union of Concerned Scientists or others, they agree on a story that’s plausible to them. But they really don’t think about the worst case. They don’t expect the unexpected.

NWJ: With that kind of short-sighted thinking, is it likely that we will see an accident at one of these aging facilities, such as Pickering or San Onofre?

AG: Well, the good news is – for Americans – is that we would not build Pickering in the United States. It’s got some design flaws that the Americans don’t accept. And the good news for Californians is that three days after I spoke with Prime Minister Kan and Jaczko and Bradford, the utility decided to shut San Onofre down forever. So neither San Onofre 2 or 3 is a threat to the public health and welfare any more because they’ll never start back up.

MG: Isn’t it true that the reason Edison said it shut San Onofre down was the uncertainty of the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board decision? And isn’t that due in a large part to the work that we did at Fairewinds?

AG: Yeah. The Friends of the Earth hired an attorney to petition the NRC to ask for public participation in the process. And that was almost a year ago. And the NRC said well, we don’t know if the public has a right to participate or not. And they formed this thing called an Atomic Safety & Licensing Board to evaluate whether or not the public had a right to a public hearing.

MG: And the ASLB as it’s called – the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board, is an adjudicatory panel. And they make a judge finding. Am I correct?

AG: Yeah, there’s 3 judges. So it’s a 3-judge tribunal. And what happened is after some testimony provided by experts from Friends of the Earth, including us, and then oral arguments by the attorney that Friends of the Earth hired, the Atomic Safety & Licensing Board shocked the industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by saying the public is entitled to a public hearing. It sounds obvious to the rest of us, but it certainly was a shock to both Edison and to the NRC that public involvement is expected.

MG: When you say it’s a shock to the NRC, it’s a shock to their staff that was siding with Edison that Edison could move ahead.

AG: Yeah, it was pretty clear for the last 16 months that the vast majority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff wanted Edison to move ahead, even though they didn’t tell the truth about like for like.

NWJ: Can you explain a little bit more about that incident with Edison? What does like for like mean?

AG: Yeah. There was – Fairewinds caught the fact that the original steam generators weren’t at all like the replacement steam generators. And yet Edison said they were like for like. Senator Barbara Boxer released a letter about three weeks ago and in it – it was an Edison letter written in 2004 – that said that the original and the replacement generators were not like for like, and that there were potentially dangerous vibrations that could be occurring. So Edison has known about potentially dangerous vibrations since 2004, but portrayed to the NRC and to the Public Service Commission in California that they had the utmost confidence that these generators were going to work. Now we call that prudence in the expert witness testimony field. If a company makes a decision that’s not foreseeable, they get their money back, because it’s a prudent decision. But in this case, the Edison decision to build these generators was imprudent and they knew it. So there’s billions of dollars at stake here that shouldn’t be paid for by the people of California. This was an imprudent decision by Edison and it should definitely not be carried by the rate payers but rather it should be carried by the stockholders. It’s their mistake and the people of California –

NWJ: They’re asking the people of California not only to pay for this but to put their own public safety at risk. Is that right?

MG: That is right. That’s what Edison did. The rate payers have already paid 1.3 billion dollars in extra charges and for damaged equipment – these tubes that were leaking and were improperly designed by Edison. And Edison kept lying to regulators, lying to the NRC, viciously attacking us for our reports, lying to the Public Service Commission, that oh, they didn’t know about this – until a whistleblower brought forward these documents and gave them to Senator Boxer. And my hat’s off – hat tip to that whistleblower who had the courage to do that.

AG: You know, the new generators cost 800 million dollars. And then the outage that went on for 18 months cost 500 million dollars. Plus every month that the plant was shut down, the people of California paid another 60 million dollars – every month for 16 months. So that’s another 750 million dollars to pay for the salaries of the 2,000 people that weren’t generating any electricity. So the whole bill to the State of California is something north of 2 billion dollars.

NWJ: What kind of responsibility is Edison Electric taking?

AG: None. They’re blaming everybody except Edison Electric. Their press release said that the NRC process is wrong. And then their press released blamed the people that built the steam generator – Mitsubishi – but they never admitted any of the problem fell back on them. This was a self-inflicted wound and I think Edison is refusing to admit that.

MG: It’s really clear when you look, especially with – we had outlined that in our report, what the regulation requires a utility or an energy company to do when it makes a change to a piece of safety-related equipment, and what it has to do. And Edison did not do that. They claimed that it was an oversight. They claimed they didn’t know. But this 2004 memo proves they knew and they did it willfully. So Senator Boxer has also asked for a Department of Justice investigation and personally I think there should be criminal prosecution. I mean they put the lives of 8-1/2 million people at risk who are in close proximity to that plant.

AG: The term is called a materially false statement. And when you tell a regulator something that’s wrong and you know it, that’s called a materially false statement. And they were doing that. When I took the stand back in January, four days before I took the stand, they sent a letter in trying to attack my upcoming testimony. And they said repeatedly they had no knowledge that these steam generators were going to have problems. Well, Senator Boxer’s letter shows that they made a materially false statement, and that’s a really big lie basically. And that requires investigation by the federal police. And I hope that there’s an investigation ongoing because as far as I’m concerned, the letter that preceded my testimony back in January was loaded with materially false statements.

NWJ: Does this speak to a larger issue? These power plants are supposed to be self-reporting. And yet they’re also supposed to be profitable. Do they have the responsibilities to the rate payers or to their stockholders?

AG: Yeah, the NRC’s entire structure is that they count on these people admitting when they break the speed limit. And I don’t know how many people drive over to the police station and turn themselves in when they’ve broken the speed limit. I can assure you that nuclear utilities don’t do it, either. And that’s exactly what happened at Edison. They broke the speed limit. They broke the speed of sound as far as that goes. Their damage was predictable. They knew it and yet they hid and chose not to tell that to the regulator.

NWJ: Now that the plant has been shut down, what is the next step to make sure that the people of California are not negatively impacted?

MG: The next step is the decommissioning and the dismantlement. And my concern is, the industry is trying to do a thing they call safe store.

AG: Maggie, what is safe store?

MG: I think it’s a euphemism for lazy store. It’s passing the buck and the safety factors to another generation – two generations down. It would mean the plant would be mothballed for 60 years and sit there. This carcass would be lying on the shores of the Pacific Ocean on the San Onofre beach and at risk to any kind of – at risk to any kind of earthquake or seismic event. And it would just be sitting there with all of its buildings intact and mothballed in concrete. And they would expect, then, 60 years later to take it apart. And I think that’s just a horrendous legacy. We’ve seen some of the plants that are mothballed like that are already leaking. There’s been near misses with fuel pools. I think Arnie can speak to that better than I can.

AG: Yeah. If the people of California push Edison, this thing could be turned back into the beautiful beach it used to be in about 10 years. They can be completely decommissioned and turned into beautiful sand and the beach it was, with one exception. And that’s the spent nuclear fuel. The spent nuclear fuel is in the reactor right now but quickly will come out of the reactor and go into the spent fuel pool. It has to stay in the spent fuel pool for about five years until it cools down enough. But then it could be put in dry casks to be stored outside in air. So eventually – say 10 years out – there will be a parking lot full of these huge cylinders loaded with radioactive spent fuel. There’s enough Cesium in those spent fuel containers that it equals 700 nuclear weapons – all of the weapons that went off in the atmosphere over the 40’s and the 50’s and the 60’s and the 70’s – all that radiation that’s thrown up is in the fuel that’s on the San Onofre site. So it’s important to protect that piece of it, but the rest of the site and all those big buildings there can be dismantled completely and turned into the beach it used to be.

MG: Who’s going to pay for that?

AG: Well, they got 2.6 billion dollars already set aside. And that should be more than enough. The decommissioning study shows about a billion dollars a nuclear reactor. So I think there’s enough money set aside to completely decommission the plant.

NWJ: What could go wrong with the clean-up effort at San Onofre? Are there any unforeseen costs? Can you talk about other complications you’ve seen with similar power plants as they have been decommissioned?

AG: Some plants when they are decommissioned discover that pipes and pumps and things like that have been leaking for 40 years. At Connecticut Yankee they found that a tank had been leaking for about 30 years when it was decommissioned. It had put down radioactive Strontium into the groundwater. And that added about a billion dollars to the cost of the cleanup. So if all goes well, there’s enough money to completely decommission the plant quickly. But you want to do it now because if it’s leaking, you don’t want to give that leak a head start. And it’s important to do it soon so the leak doesn’t have a chance to spread out – if there is a leak. And if there isn’t, that’s great. You get your beach back in 10 years.

NWJ: What can we do to make sure that this cleanup effort is done in the right way, in the best interests of public safety?

AG: Yeah, I think the public deserves someone on the cleanup committee to make sure that this plant is safely decommissioned. Right now the Nuclear Regulator Commission will say hey, that’s our responsibility, the public has no rights. These are the same people that missed the fact that the steam generator was falling apart. So I think it would be a great idea if the people in California demanded a seat at the table and said hey, we want to be part of this decommissioning with the goal of getting our beach back so we can surf and enjoy the outdoors.

MG: And that we want to be sure that the plant is decommissioned and dismantled without leaving a carcass in lazy store for 60 years.

AG: Yeah, there can be an awful lot of misspent money unless someone’s really watching the piggy bank. And I think Edison is not going to watch the piggy bank very well. So I think that, yeah, it would be awfully important to have public involvement to make sure the money’s not being misspent, that leaks, if there are any, have been detected and been isolated, and that the process moves along just as fast as possible. Edison right now is saying decades. I can’t understand that. They’ve got 2.6 billion set aside. That should be enough to decommission this plant.

MG: Arnie, what are the national ramification for what happened at San Onofre and the like for like and the 50.59 process and how the regulator oversees a utility getting relicensed?

AG: The shutdown at San Onofre has national ramifications. It’s a seismic event for the nuclear industry. The industry lost 4 nuclear plants in the last 6 months and we’re doing just fine without them. And I think the public understands now that nuclear plants are not necessarily clean, safe or reliable. There’s a couple more plants on the ropes. Probably the most significant one is Fort Calhoun that’s owned by Nebraska Public Power District. But nationally, the other big issue is this like for like or 50.59 in law. And actually, the Davis Bessie plant out near Toledo is the leader of the pack there. They have a hearing coming up on a steam generator modification. Based on what the public’s learned at San Onofre, the public is demanding a hearing before this generator is fixed as opposed to waiting for it to break afterward.

NWJ: Thank you for catching us up on the permanent closing of the San Onofre nuclear plant and on the continuing struggle to deal with the aging Pickering Nuclear Plant in Toronto. In closing, I would like to ask if either of you have any other issues that should be discussed during this podcast.

AG: We mentioned a couple of times that American scientists in Japan have really questioned the data that the Japanese are presenting.

MG: A noted author, Art Keller, who has published several books and writes for a lot of different magazines, did a story and a full interview on this team that went to Japan and did radiological testing. And it’s very chilling to read his report. And that will be on our blog on Thursday. So I hope everyone reads it.

NWJ: I’d like to close by thanking both of you for being here today. It has been a real pleasure.

At least $8.2 Trillion would be needed to build the 1,000 atomic reactors the nuclear industry wants – that’s 1 reactor every 12-days for 35-years. Watch Fairewind's animation to see what it means and why!

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